Research Tools for Understanding Disinformation

A Browser Extension for Adding Context to Online Stories by Suggesting Related Wikipedia Articles

WikiWhatsThis will be a browser extension that adds context to online stories by allowing readers to highlight arbitrary chunks of text and request related Wikipedia articles. The extension will use text features combined with Wikipedia page quality signals to show the user the bigger picture around what they are reading.

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Who Targets Me are a small group of activists creating and managing a crowdsourced global database of political adverts placed on social media.

We were founded by Sam Jeffers and Louis Knight Webb in 2017 during the UK elections to monitor the use of online political ads in real time and provide analysis of their intended impact. The Who Targets Me plug-in has now been installed by over 30,000 users worldwide in more than 100 countries and 20 languages.

As far as we are aware, “What’s Crap on WhatsApp?” is the first show of its kind. We’re going to fight WhatsApp misinformation on WhatsApp in a format designed for WhatsApp.

Fact-checking organisations have traditionally tried to attract readers to websites, video and social media. But we’re taking our show to people on WhatsApp in a format widely used on the platform.

WeVerify’s aim is to address the advanced content verification challenges through a participatory verification approach, open source algorithms, low-overhead human-in-the-loop machine learning and intuitive visualizations. Social media and web content will be analysed for detection of disinformation; contextualised within the broader social web and media ecosystem; and misleading and fabricated content will be exposed as such, both through micro-targeted debunking and a blockchain-based public database of known fakes.

Ushahidi, which translates to “testimony” in Swahili, was developed to map reports of violence in Kenya after the post-election violence in 2008. Since then, thousands have used our crowdsourcing tools to raise their voice. We’re a technology leader in Africa, headquartered in Nairobi, with a global team. We are a social enterprise that provides software and services to numerous sectors and civil society to help improve the bottom up flow of information.

We believe that if marginalized people are able to easily communicate to those who aim to serve them...

This group is a product of Wellesley College and a grant from the National Science Foundation. It tasks itself with investigating rumors and other claims on Twitter for validity, measuring both the spread of the claim (how many people have read it) and its validity. The site also offers blogs for meta-analysis of the misinformation on Twitter it investigates.

The non­governmental organization Media Reforms Center is an educational platform, founded by Mohyla School of Journalism at National University of ‘Kyiv­Mohyla Academy’, which aims to implement high standards of journalism education in Ukraine, raise the level of media literacy, inform about the danger of propaganda and dissemination of fake information in the media.

PUSAD is a center for research on religion and democracy, they conduct research on hate speech and political disinformation.

Pressland is a first-of-its-kind data-intelligence platform that maps global media production in real time. It's our mission to fight fake news, rebuild public trust and support counter-radicalization efforts in fragile regions.

We analyze:

- Every article
- Every author
- Every editor
- Every outlet
- All professional associations and related work
- All production and distribution data

This data is indexed, verified and distributed using the Universal News Protocol, a new open standard for media production.

Bots, short for robots, are computer programs designed to perform specific tasks. The first robots did not have malicious intentions, and even today there are good bots, whose purpose is to demand accountability from politicians, viralize causes for gender equality or help organize the (many) daily tasks of their users. Good right?